Tuesday, 9 February 2016

Sweet pea dilemmas...

I'm in a complete spin...a sweet pea spin...which sweetpeas?...do I want soft pastel shades or dark moody and dramatic...I just can't decide. I keep making lists then changing my mind and pretty soon if I don't get a move on it'll be too late! Arrgghhh. I did sow a few left over seeds that I had before Christmas because apparently they do better from an autumn sowing. They are sat in root trainers in my little plastic greenhouse and seem to be doing ok, I've pinched them out and they have multiple shoots now. We shall see which do better for me this year, the early or later sown ones.I made the mistake last year of planting a few borage seeds around the sweet pea wigwams...those few seeds turned into a huge (quite beautiful) impenetrable wall that the poor little sweet peas couldn't even get a tendril over so this year I am planning to plant them mostly in their own glory well away from the borage anyway. However, I've seen deep purple sweet peas grown with purple podded peas and they looked amazing...so that might be at least one colour I can make a definite decision on as I'm growing Shiraz mangetout peas and Blauhilde climbing beans this year.I don't think I can go too wrong whatever colour combination I decide on, they are all very beautiful and in the grand scheme of things worrying about the colour of your sweet peas seems so trivial but it's a nice distraction to have. I'm also trying to decide which potatoes to grow, last year I grew 6 different types of Albert Bartlett potatoes to see which ones we preferred. I'm definitely sold on Anya, they are absolutely delicious salad potatoes, simply cooked fresh from the ground (great roasted too!) they were a family favorite and very prolific from only 6 tubers! The other variety we really liked were Purple Majesty, they weren't quite as successful as Anya but the ones we did get were really tasty and quite novel looking, though I wouldn't recommend them mashed...they go a very fetching shade of grey! They were quite hard to dig up though because their dark purple skins are almost impossible to spot in the soil! I might be about to learn a hard lesson though because this year it seems quite hard to find a source for the Purple Majesty as they seem to be very popular and have sold out on the sites I've looked at unless I want to buy a field full of them! The lesson being get in early for those more unusual things...especially if you see them popping up in celebrity chefs recipes!

Just realised from reading through this that I seem to have a bit of a purple theme running through my allotment this year...wonder if that means anything?